


Corners on the curving sky

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Series: Under the curving sky [2]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: First Kiss, Fluff and Humor, Getting Together, Hospitals, M/M, POV Steve McGarrett, because danny and charlie are still in there for canon reasons, set at the start of season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-27 23:28:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16712047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: “So, what’s up? How have you been in the-” Danny reaches over to the nightstand, crowded with presents, to activate the screen of his phone for a quick check. “Wow, babe, the whole forty-five minutes since I’ve last seen you?”“Good,” Steve says, choosing to ignore any implications hidden under Danny’s words. “I ran into Eric in the lobby. Twice.”Steve follows some advice Eric gave him, and it leads to the desired outcome, with some detours.





	Corners on the curving sky

**Author's Note:**

> Funny story: I hadn’t even considered writing a sequel to Under the curving sky, and then like half the comments asked for one (which I get, in hindsight), and then the thought was in my head and when I went to write down a sentence or two that I liked, instead the first full thousand words of this came rolling out. This is dedicated to everyone who commented, because this literally wouldn’t have existed without you.
> 
> If you haven’t read the first story, I recommend that you do that before starting on this one, because this one will make a lot more sense with some context.
> 
> The title is from a beautiful poem by Gwendolyn Brooks by the same name, which you can read [here](http://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/gb2-corner.htm), if you want. It’s not very long and well worth your time!

The private hospital room is quiet when Steve enters. Danny is lying down in his bed, back turned to the door, and he appears to be sleeping. Steve waits a few moments, watching the back of Danny’s head and the small movements of the blanket with Danny’s even breathing. Seems Eric was right about how Steve would find him.

Steve briefly – very briefly – entertains the thought of turning around and leaving. Danny and Charlie don’t have much use for visitors while they’re sleeping, but if it doesn’t benefit them, it won’t hurt them, either. They don’t even have to know, really, and he’s come all this way. Besides, he’s already closed the door behind him, and opening it again means risking more noise.

He recognizes that his excuses are weak, but it doesn’t matter. So is he, when it comes to Danny and his children.

He sneaks around the foot of Danny’s bed to the curtain that hides Charlie’s. When he peeks around it, Charlie is just as deep asleep as his dad. His blanket almost fully hides his tiny body, only the top half of his face and his mess of blond hair sticking out. He is snuggled up to the toy truck that Steve brought him this morning and it’s pressed into his cheek in a way that will leave a temporary mark after he wakes up, but his grip on it looks so tight that Steve doesn’t dare try to take it from him.

“You’re being creepy, Steven,” Danny says, from right behind him.

Steve startles and seriously, honest to God _jumps_ before turning around.

Danny rolls his eyes at him as he sits up in bed. He’s clearly not sleeping, but he does look and sound like he might have been close to it, at least. A few strands of his normally so controlled hair have gone rogue. “And this guy calls himself a Navy SEAL.”

“You’re awake,” Steve says. And then, because he knows what kind of response that will get him and he doesn’t want Danny’s eyes to roll so hard they will leave his head, “It looked like you were asleep.”

“I was trying to be, but that didn’t quite work while there was someone in the room staring first at me and then at my son.”

“I can leave.” Steve is still so jumpy he’s already halfway to the door when Danny calls his name again and he halts in his tracks, turning back.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Danny tells him, half exasperated, half like he might laugh at Steve. “You’re here now.”

Steve takes that as the permission to stay that it’s clearly intended to be. He spots the chair that he sat in earlier, pushed against the wall now, so he brings it over to Danny’s bedside again. He could, technically, sit by the wall and it wouldn’t be that weird, but he just plain doesn’t want to. If Danny asks, he can say he needs to be closer so they don’t wake Charlie up.

Danny doesn’t ask. He just shifts in the bed a little, scooting slightly closer to Steve, and Steve isn’t even sure if Danny is aware he does it.

“So, what’s up? How have you been in the-” Danny reaches over to the nightstand, crowded with presents, to activate the screen of his phone for a quick check. “Wow, babe, the whole forty-five minutes since I’ve last seen you?”

“Good,” Steve says, choosing to ignore any implications hidden under Danny’s words. “I ran into Eric in the lobby. Twice.”

“What, again when he was leaving? What is this, are you two playing tag?”

“Not intentionally.” Eric’s cryptic words from the second time Steve encountered him have been in the back of his brain the entire time. He now finally has a chance to do something about it, so he takes that opportunity. “Eric, uh- He told me everything.”

Danny narrows his eyes at him. “Everything, huh? What does that mean?”

“That’s what I asked him,” is what Steve wants to say, but doesn’t, because it would give the game away. Instead, he just waits Danny out.

He doesn’t have to wait very long. Danny caves pretty quickly, but whatever Steve expected, it was not for Danny to start rubbing his temples almost violently, and keep his hands where they obscure most of his face while he mutters, “Fuck. I’m going to kill him. I’m going to have some strong words with his mother about teaching your kids the value of privacy and of keeping their damn traps shut.”

Steve is more than a little alarmed at this point. Worst case scenarios are barreling through his head in the way he expects they always do for Danny in every situation. Is Charlie not getting better like he should? Is Danny sick, too? Did Rachel convince them to leave the island?

“Hey,” he says, and his hand is on Danny’s wrist, even though he doesn’t remember putting it there. He doesn’t have to pull very hard for Danny to lower his own hands from his face, but he doesn’t let go of Danny’s wrist after. He even squeezes a little harder, maybe. “What’s this about? Are you okay?”

Danny looks freaked, but a heavy swirl of suspicion gets mixed in when he processes Steve’s words. “Wait, what did Eric tell you, exactly?”

Steve is completely done with the ruse by now. “Just that I should tell you that he told me stuff. I asked him what it was about, but he wouldn’t say.”

“God,” Danny says. His eyes wander around the room like he can’t look at Steve. “Gonna kill him, I swear. Kill him and make it look like an accident.”

“I’ll help you,” Steve offers.

“You shouldn’t. You can’t go around killing people if you don’t know what it’s for.”

“I do know what it’s for.” He tightens his hold on Danny’s wrist, just a little, to remind him he’s there. “It’s for you.”

Danny stares at him. “Tell me, Steve, how in the hell is it that something as certifiably insane as that actually sounds sweet when you say it?”

And he likes that. He likes that Danny calls him sweet, especially in this annoyed, roundabout way, because it’s so much more genuine and more _Danny_ than it would have been if delivered straight. Steve grins at him, and makes sure to make it a little over the top in self-satisfaction, just to distract Danny even further from whatever had him feeling so bad earlier. “I’m just a naturally sweet guy.”

“I bet,” Danny huffs.

There’s a pause, and it’s dangerous, because Steve is on the very brink of offering Danny a taste to verify the outcome of that bet for himself. He isn’t sure what’s wrong with his brain.

In the end, Danny speaks up again before Steve can, mercifully. “You still don’t even know what this is about.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Whatever practical joke Eric was trying to play, it can’t be worth it if it makes Danny react like this.

Danny twists his wrist until Steve lets go enough that Danny can bring their hands together, instead. He squeezes once, and then lets go. Steve takes the hint and withdraws his hand to the edge of the mattress, but doesn’t go further than that.

Danny sighs. “Alright, here’s the deal: I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to freeze the kids out of your life if I do, whatever your reaction is. They love you and they don’t deserve that.”

“What? Danny- I would never-” Steve wants to say something more intelligent to that, but he finds himself lost for words. He literally can’t think of a single possible scenario where that would ever be a conceivable outcome. He’s had nightmares about Danny moving on, Danny leaving, or Danny just plain deciding he doesn’t want Steve to be a bad influence on Grace and Charlie any longer, but he’s never considered distancing himself voluntarily.

“No, I know that,” Danny says, but it doesn’t sound like he knows. It sounds like he’s bracing himself for something. “Here’s a fun fact for you, though: Eric, my nephew, who is currently crashing on my couch and now works with us? He, apparently, got it into his head that we-” Danny uses the hand Steve was holding just half a minute ago to make stabby motions indicating the two of them. “-are partners at more than work, if you catch my drift.”

Steve does, but it takes him an embarrassingly long time. His instinctive reaction is ‘but we are’, until it finally sinks in that what Danny means isn’t just that they’re fishing buddies or that they partner in bets against Chin and Kono or that they spend basically all of their free time together, regardless of what it is they’re doing. “Oh,” he says. It’s perhaps not his smartest response ever.

Danny doesn’t roll his eyes this time. “‘Oh’, he says. That’s nice. Just ‘oh’? No other vowels you want to share with me?”

“Which ones would you like to hear?” he shoots back, mostly because that’s how they talk to each other and he’s so used to the pattern of their banter he could probably keep it up in his sleep.

“I don’t know, Steve. Surprise me.”

There’s something Steve still doesn’t understand about this. Danny looks far too stressed. It’s not healthy, definitely not while he’s already in hospital, which in turn stresses Steve out a bit. “Why is this such a big deal? Usually you just laugh if people think we’re a couple.”

“Usually – and it’s fascinating that that’s a word we can apply in this context, but let’s not even get into that right now- _Usually_ it’s people we don’t know. People who see us, and watch you introduce me as your partner while you put your hand on my back and distract them with your smile, and then their brains take a left turn and make them assume you mean things that you don’t. This isn’t a case like that. This is my nephew, who I’ve known his entire life, and who knows me pretty well, for all that he’s an idiot.”

“Oh,” Steve says, again.

Danny looks like he might burst at any moment.

“So… this means what?”

“This means, this means-” Danny’s volume has been rising steadily over the past minute, but now he snaps his mouth shut abruptly and darts a guilty look at the curtain. When no noises are forthcoming that could indicate a three-year-old’s sleep has been disturbed, he looks back to Steve, but his hands aren’t as choppy as before when he goes on. “This means you’re either willfully ignorant or a giant, oblivious idiot, babe. Whichever it is, it’s fine. Let’s just forget this happened, yeah?”

Steve’s head is spinning. “No.” He’s not sure of a lot, but he’s sure of that, at least. “You can’t just- You can’t just do this-”

“Do what? What am I doing?”

“You’re implying a whole lot but you’re not actually saying anything. You’re driving me crazy.”

“You say that like you weren’t crazy to begin with.”

“Yes, _for you_.” He says it, and then hears what he said and sits up a little straighter and withdraws his hand completely from the bed. He resists the urge to cross his arms over his chest, because he’s read too many psychology books to miss the strong message that would send that he’s uncertain and a little scared. It’s true, but that doesn’t mean he wants to project it. “Again,” he adds, belatedly. “Lots of things are for you where I’m concerned, Danny, and you’re telling me that _I’m_ being willfully ignorant.”

“You,” Danny says, with no context except how his eyebrows have gone up, and he stops talking again, and he shakes his head, and he reaches out a hand. “You’re gonna have to come over here if you want me to kiss you, because if I try to lean over I promise you I’ll fall out of this damn bed and then, well-”

“I would catch you,” Steve says, but he’s also already up out of his chair and looking for the best way to approach this. Danny solves the problem by shifting away in the bed, covers and all, to the point where he seems to be in danger of falling off the other end of it, and patting the open space next to him.

“I know, I know you would,” Danny is saying, while Steve clambers onto the bed, unexpectedly clumsy in his haste. He knocks his shoulder hard into Danny’s, but he grabs Danny’s arm before anything disastrous can happen. Danny pulls at his shirt and Steve lets himself be reeled in, insofar as that’s even necessary anymore when they’re already squished together on the narrow hospital bed that was absolutely not designed with two grown men in mind.

Danny is just a breath away now, but Steve suddenly finds he can’t stop talking. His brain isn’t entirely caught up to what his body already knows. “What the hell did you and Eric talk about that it led to this?”

“He said I was obvious,” Danny says, trailing a finger over the side of Steve’s neck, which makes Steve shiver, “and implied your penis was forgettable.”

It feels like the laugh is punched out of Steve, that’s how sudden it is. In his surprise, he pulls back a bit, to see if Danny is making this up.

“No really, he did,” Danny swears, like he can read Steve’s mind. 

Steve wishes he could read Danny’s, sometimes. It’s sure to be a fascinating space. “I’m not getting any less confused here,” he admits.

Danny shakes his head at him once again. “How about we circle back around to that later? Do you want to keep talking about my nephew’s antics or do you want to kiss me now?”

And well, put like that, Danny makes an excellent point. Steve doesn’t bother verbalizing a reply, because that would mean wasting precious seconds he could spend on much better things, like adopting a ‘show, don’t tell’ approach to the matter. Judging by Danny’s enthusiastic response, he’s very much on board with this executive decision on Steve’s part. Danny’s hand curls around Steve’s neck, arm resting on his chest. With Danny’s side pressed to his and his lips so stupidly soft for someone who talks so much, Steve eventually has to break the kiss because he’s getting breathless from the mere thought of it all, let alone the unbelievable reality.

Danny presses their foreheads together, and Steve is very okay with that. He feels like he’s halfway towards drunk, but he hasn’t had a single drop to drink.

Danny gives his neck a squeeze. “Only you would need _two_ explicit invitations to kiss a guy before you finally get around to it.”

“Maybe I’ve been waiting for so long that I wanted to savor the moment now that it’s finally here.”

“Savor my ass,” Danny says, and then promptly swoops in for another kiss, probably specifically to keep Steve from responding to that. Steve graciously lets him get away with it this once.

“Danno?” a small voice asks. Steve hasn’t known that voice for very long, but it’s already buried itself deep inside his heart, and he would recognize it anywhere.

He jerks back from Danny, but he doesn’t take into account that he’s still balanced a little precariously on the hospital bed, so he flails for a scary second and has to throw an arm out towards the nightstand, where he hits an unfortunate vase just wrong and sends it flying to the ground. The result is a loud crash and a mess of scattered shards of blue ceramic and colorful flowers, which lie sadly in a puddle of water.

“Shit,” he says, while Danny uses the arm that was already mostly around Steve’s chest and a hand on the arm closest to him to yank Steve back towards him. 

Danny pats his shoulder as he withdraws his hands. “Stay in one piece, please, Superman. I don’t think we could fit a third bed in here.”

“Uncle Steve?” the small voice asks, even smaller this time. It’s Charlie, standing there in pajama’s and on bare feet, still half-hidden by the curtain around his bed.

Danny turns all his attention to him and smiles that soft smile he gets around kids, especially his own. “Hey bud, what’s up? Did uncle Steve scare you with his brutish ways?”

Charlie nods, but he doesn’t seem to be feeling as shy as that makes him look, because he also comes out from behind the curtain fully. Steve was right: there are some angry red lines on his right cheek. They match a corner and a wheel of the toy truck Charlie has now pressed to his chest like it’s a life preserver.

It’s cute, but Steve feels wretched. “I’m so sorry about that, Charlie.”

“It’s okay,” Charlie says, and he even seems to mean it, because all of Danny’s kids are actual angels. His eyes light up. “Now that you’re here, can we play with the truck again, uncle Steve?”

Steve glances at Danny, who’s watching him now. He’s not sure what he expected to find in Danny’s face – reprehension, maybe, or wariness, or general anxiety about Charlie catching them kissing – but all he gets is warm amusement. They still have a lot to talk about, but clearly it can wait. He has to look away before he starts feeling too mushy to function. “Yes, Charlie, of course we can. I’d love that.”

Danny nudges Steve, which mostly just serves as a reminder that they’re still in contact from shoulder to ankle. “What is it with you and effortlessly charming Williamses, huh?”

Steve nudges him back. “I think you’re better qualified to answer that question than I am.”

Danny sticks his tongue out at him, which makes Charlie giggle. It makes Steve think of entirely different things, so he shifts and hops off the bed. He makes sure to avoid stepping in the puddle.

“Hey Charlie, I’m going to have to clean up this mess I made first, but then I’ll come play, okay?”

“Sure,” Charlie says, wonderfully agreeable.

He starts collecting the pieces of the ruined vase while he listens to Danny and Charlie chatter about how clumsy uncle Steve is and how cool the truck is and how cool it is that uncle Steve owns a truck. If he takes a little longer with it than he should, because he keeps getting distracted when he glimpses up at Danny and his son, that’s for no one to know except him.

**Author's Note:**

> There is now also a third (and probably/hopefully final) part of this unexpected series planned! It will feature the return of Eric, because I couldn’t just let him disappear from the narrative after that first story. 
> 
> You can find me on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
